If you are looking at buying a home, then here are a few tips that will help your home buying experience. All my buyers are looking for a good deal. They want to know what my secret is. I tell them all that it is just like high school. If you “act” like you aren’t interested then you will drive the other person crazy. Now if a buyer acts too hard, she will insult the seller. So here are a few things that you can do, and not do, to save yourself several thousand dollars.

• Don’t talk to the sellers. You will let information slip about your situation, and most of the time the sellers will pick up on it. If a seller is persistent, let your agent do all the talking. Just look at your agent like you are expecting them to answer whatever the seller asked.
• Don’t drive by the home multiple times. The sellers always notice. Even if you switch vehicles every time and don’t recognize you, they will acknowledge that the interest in their home has jumped up significantly. They might think they have multiple interested buyers, which would be even worse.
• Don’t ask to see the home multiple times before you put an offer on the home. Look at it once, then put an offer on it. Once the offer is accepted you can go look again take measurements for furniture, bring the in-laws over to get their approval (I’m not sure why this has to be done, but it does).
• If the sellers happen to be home, talk about another house for sale (with your agent, not the sellers, just make sure they can over hear part of it) that you have looked at, and name off all the things you liked about it. Sometimes this is hard to do when you are walking through a home that you love. If no other home compares to it, make one up or talk about the one online that you looked at that was $200,000 over your price range… Just don’t tell them that!
• Get your financing set up before you look. It is tough to find a home that you love and then not be able to qualify for that amount. It takes all the fun out of buying a home.
• Sometimes a real estate agent or builder has a “preferred” lender, and offer incentives if you use their loan officer. Sometimes this is a good deal for the buyer. Sometimes the rate or loan have been increased to cover these “incentives”. Don’t be afraid to use a preferred lender, just make sure you do your homework. Maybe visit with another loan officer and see how the deals compare.
  
  

Home buying is a very emotional process. It is important to have a realtor who is not emotionally involved. For real estate agents it is our job. It’s like a software engineer, something goes wrong and they figure it out and fix it. If I have trouble with my computer I get VERY emotionally involved and want to throw it out the window!

Buying a home can be very stressful, especially for first time home buyers. You can drastically reduce your stress if you find a successful realtor that has a lot of connections, is a skilled negotiator, and knows the whole home buying process. Several real estate agents know how to fill out the offer, but are unsure of what happens next. They don’t know what the title company actually does, besides close the loan. They think that all the loan officer does is get a loan. Both entities have a complex number of things they need to accomplish.